Gays In Refrigerators Too
So Perry Moore put his list up, and it comes with some pretty damning stats at the end, too.
Now, serious and longtime comics fans will know all this already, but for the casual and younger fan, it might come as a bit of a revelation that during the Silver Age it was actually prohibited by the comics industry rating system (much as with the Hays Code in re motion pictures) to have GLBT characters, along with werewolves, vampires, and zombies, as well as anything presenting "Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions...in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority" among other things, jumbling all representations of sex, violence, crime of any sort, cool or ambivalent villains, the undead, and youthful rebellion into one big cube of bad--
The strange thing is that even though this was left behind by the early '70s (not to mention how much of it was ignored throughout, namely all the stuff about no sexually-exploitative depictions of women!) there was no rush to bring out, say, vampire superheroes (and afaik we're still waiting for queer werewolf protagonists) although they sure did embrace the zombies, the explicit torture and gore, and other R-ratings-worthy elements. (Despite claims by Joe Q. et al that they have to stay away from queer characters because TEH GAY means an automatic R rating even if they're not doing anything, something he later backed down from - but decapitations are a-okay, go figure...)
And we are told that Marvel's chief, Joe Shooter, banned gays from his pages during his tenure - and yet, at the same time, he was willing to put out this grotesque mess, eleven years after Stonewall, when the conservative propaganda outlets were just getting started in the serious effort to advance Homosexuals as the new Enemy of Civilization ahead of Feminists and Godless Commies (helped by the fact that Americans are by-and-large easily given to irrational poison-well panics and AIDS was no exception to that purity-of-essence rule.)
How far have we [not] come? The director of 300 admits that he deliberately upped the (already-canon) swishiness of Movie!Xerxes because, quote, "What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?" (But there's nothing homophobic in that, oh no!) The remake of 3:10 to Yuma reportedly now contains a villainous-gays plot thread. Is it really better to have a hitherto-invisible group represented in media, when they're only, or chiefly, shown in negative ways now? My personal inclination, based on the way I feel about stories with an all-male cast vs stories where the token female charas are Too Stupid To Live and/or Stereotypically Wickedly Wileful, is to say "Hellno!"
Which is what Perry Moore is saying, and the perpetrators taking umbrage at.
As far as Mark Millar's denial of authorial responsibility goes, I didn't know him from Adam before all this (unlike Claremont, who may be a great writer of comics but who can't write prose novels to save his life, or Straczinski, who actually wrote one of the unforgettable heroic-heroine-death-scenes of '80s TV, which I never knew until recently) but a couple more things have come out of the past that make his words ring hollower (as well as revealing his Inner Idiot - gee, who'da thunk that there was overlap between gamers and comics readers? and that "jokingly" insulting one group might piss off your core readership? Only anyone who's ever hung around fans, is all--)
"I pitched this to DC for a laugh years back. The idea was that, like Death of Superman, we had Rape of Wonder Woman; a twenty-two page rape scene that opened up into a gatefold at the end just like Superman did.
"They didn't even phone me BACK!!!!!
"Snigger,
MM"
(I know now to skip over anything that's got his name on the cover, altho' if DH ever does want to turn their Gor properties into a comic, they definitely should contact him. I also notice that his board archives no longer go back that far...yay for auto-Orwellizing!)
This isn't a new concern, btw - Moore has simply articulated, very visibly, something that's been simmering in fandom for over a year now (again, the massive overlap between contempt for women and contempt for gay men in our society has meant that addressing one inevitably leads to the other) as laid out in this 2006 post
and commented on here, (also here and here) with the usual chorus of "No way is 3X 10X 20 ?X enemy action! Straight White Guys TOTALLY get hurt the EXACT same way too! You just want YOUR characters kept in cotton wadding instead of realizing that to have a great story you need to have TENSION!" from the usual suspects.
By contrast, the autonomous medium of webcomics allows for a lot more frank addressing of social issues, even more than the print indy comics world does - in principle, at least, since what it's actually used for much of the time is more (often-indifferently-drawn) T&A, and inwardly-spiraling self-referential humor. But still you sometimes get strips like Dominic Deegan, Oracle For Hire which started out as an in-joke-a-day strip but quickly turned into a plot-and-character-driven heroic fantasy of its own - one which routinely addresses sexism, racism, and homophobia in a traditional D&D setting, if a bit anviliciously at times. -I'm wondering when we'll see a sequence in mainstream comics - even the "edgy" "dark" ones that have featured jackhammer rape - with the namesake character's best friend being a bishie closeted antihero struggling graphically with the temptation to kill his unacknowledged love-interest's girlfriend so as to "claim" him, or the portrait of fannish dismay as idolized sports stars are revealed to be vile homophobic bigots and serial abusers of women...? And yet volume 1 is sold out and to be reprinted, without the benefit of a big corporate marketing department.
This is relevant because one of the frequent arguments for promoting homophobic narrative (or, conversely, having no queer characters at all) is that it's
"just good business", as if there were any respectable amount of stats to work from, where you could actually say that gee, Good-Guy Gays don't sell, it's obviously that and not the fact that we screwed up the release dates, or didn't promote it hardly at all, or that the overall plot stunk, or the continuity was ignored, or the art was really REALLY bad, or any of the myriad QC issues that plague mainstream sequential art. (Ditto for Strong Female Charas.) Obviously, you can't have it both ways (and expect to be taken seriously as an intellectual middleweight, even) - you can't say "There's nothing homophobic (or sexist, or racist) about plotline/characterization X!" and also say "Institutional homophobia/sexism/racism is Just Good Business!" without undercutting yourself.
Let's translate these questions, frex, out of weasel into plain English:
Was Shooter's story for "Rampaging Hulk" homophobic, especially in light of the supposed "no homosexuality" policy he was supposed to have in his books?
Or was the story a product of the time?
And if Shooter really had such a policy, was it because of homophobia or economic considerations?
becomes
Was Shooter's story homophobic or a product of the time because it was an expression of widespread societal homophobia?
and
Was Shooter's reported "No Gays Allowed" policy because of HIS homophobia, or economic considerations conscienceless pandering to homophobes?
To which I add, So what? like if it were the former, that would be any improvement? I hear this kind of tripe all the time from the fannish defenders of institutional sexism, too, and (albeit slightly softer) re institutional racism. But just swap out "homophobia" with "anti-Semitism" and see if Occasional's questions still sound like a good defense of Marvel...no, I didn't think so. If it came out that Fr. Coughlin hadn't really meant any of the things he said, but was just capitalizing on the spirit of the '30s, that would hardly exonerate him or his broadcasters.
And if exclusion and discrimination were good business, wouldn't you expect to see comics sales (and other problem-child mainstream media) overall going up, instead of down? Instead of increasing DIY responses, with an ever-increasing number of quality works amid all the Sturgeon?
It's funny that there are fannish complaints about having openly-GLBT characters, because superhero stories shouldn't be All About TEH SEX and that's what having queer charas does to a book - and no, I'm not going to point out the irony inherent in how no one ever asks this about having het charas marry or date or boff or get pregnant - when it is the editors and writers who insist these days on making their gay charas All About TEH SEX, in writing them as The Ones Who Get Violated (Like Women) and/or are permanently traumatized/motivated by this, or making the Francophone gorilla sidekick's quest to get a new body for his supervillainous master not just motivated by gratitude and affection - neither of which are ruled out by queerness - but by an overwhelming desire to be able to get it on with him at last. And arguments that there's no dramatic mileage to be had in having queer couples whose relationship isn't always full of angst and misery and threats of sexual violence against one or the other? Um, ISTR a number of teams and partnerships which have historically functional relationships - and where the stress isn't all about sexually-related threats (though this does happen to the female partners all too often...) but about the dangers of the superheroing job, which don't all revolve around rape somehow (at least when it comes to Straight Dudes--!)
No, lazy, unimaginative, and ignorant writing is not an excuse. It's an explanation - but it doesn't excuse anything.
And because I'm Evil Chaotic Good, I'll close by wondering how many of those fanboys whinging on Byrne's board about WHY should there have to be ANY gays in our comics, anyway? are not also Monty Python fans...pretty damn few, I'm betting. (Why? What's Holy Grail got to do with anything?)
ETA: Here's a detailed take on the Freedom Ring situation by a fan whose experience of RL violence gives a more relevant perspective than most fans will ever have re gaybashing (frex see also this actor's indignation at "ungrateful" and "oversensitive" responses to his attempts to profit off "humorous" references to it) and the usual denials of significance by the privileged, which I juxtapose with Joe Q's handwaving re bias and his revelation that the writer of the Freedom Ring series always planned for the character to be feeble and ineffective and a victim...which he seems to have known even when he was touting FR as "proof" that Marvel wasn't homophobic. Smarmy.
Further: OMG. No excuses. NO DAMN EXCUSES for them. What's missing from a tragic story about a gay superhero who just can't cut it? Did you say a reminder that the most bland, conventional same-sex relationship is inherently "kinky" in the minds of the mainstream jackasses? Or did you say, a graveside joke about pegboys at his funeral? Hey, go for broke, they're BOTH the right answer! Of course only people looking to be offended would find anything wrong with any of this. --Not to mention turning Peter Parker from wiseacre to sociopath - Spidey makes bad jokes at the expense of his opponents, and at his own expense, in typical underdog/sad-clown style, he's not a soulless fratboy. Somebody take these children's crayons away before they hurt themselves...
Reminder: If you have, or spot, any posts or pages you'd like to suggest for this month's Carnival for SF Fans/Creators of Color, you can use this automatic form to submit them with.
Now, serious and longtime comics fans will know all this already, but for the casual and younger fan, it might come as a bit of a revelation that during the Silver Age it was actually prohibited by the comics industry rating system (much as with the Hays Code in re motion pictures) to have GLBT characters, along with werewolves, vampires, and zombies, as well as anything presenting "Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions...in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority" among other things, jumbling all representations of sex, violence, crime of any sort, cool or ambivalent villains, the undead, and youthful rebellion into one big cube of bad--
The strange thing is that even though this was left behind by the early '70s (not to mention how much of it was ignored throughout, namely all the stuff about no sexually-exploitative depictions of women!) there was no rush to bring out, say, vampire superheroes (and afaik we're still waiting for queer werewolf protagonists) although they sure did embrace the zombies, the explicit torture and gore, and other R-ratings-worthy elements. (Despite claims by Joe Q. et al that they have to stay away from queer characters because TEH GAY means an automatic R rating even if they're not doing anything, something he later backed down from - but decapitations are a-okay, go figure...)
And we are told that Marvel's chief, Joe Shooter, banned gays from his pages during his tenure - and yet, at the same time, he was willing to put out this grotesque mess, eleven years after Stonewall, when the conservative propaganda outlets were just getting started in the serious effort to advance Homosexuals as the new Enemy of Civilization ahead of Feminists and Godless Commies (helped by the fact that Americans are by-and-large easily given to irrational poison-well panics and AIDS was no exception to that purity-of-essence rule.)
How far have we [not] come? The director of 300 admits that he deliberately upped the (already-canon) swishiness of Movie!Xerxes because, quote, "What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you?" (But there's nothing homophobic in that, oh no!) The remake of 3:10 to Yuma reportedly now contains a villainous-gays plot thread. Is it really better to have a hitherto-invisible group represented in media, when they're only, or chiefly, shown in negative ways now? My personal inclination, based on the way I feel about stories with an all-male cast vs stories where the token female charas are Too Stupid To Live and/or Stereotypically Wickedly Wileful, is to say "Hellno!"
Which is what Perry Moore is saying, and the perpetrators taking umbrage at.
As far as Mark Millar's denial of authorial responsibility goes, I didn't know him from Adam before all this (unlike Claremont, who may be a great writer of comics but who can't write prose novels to save his life, or Straczinski, who actually wrote one of the unforgettable heroic-heroine-death-scenes of '80s TV, which I never knew until recently) but a couple more things have come out of the past that make his words ring hollower (as well as revealing his Inner Idiot - gee, who'da thunk that there was overlap between gamers and comics readers? and that "jokingly" insulting one group might piss off your core readership? Only anyone who's ever hung around fans, is all--)
"I pitched this to DC for a laugh years back. The idea was that, like Death of Superman, we had Rape of Wonder Woman; a twenty-two page rape scene that opened up into a gatefold at the end just like Superman did.
"They didn't even phone me BACK!!!!!
"Snigger,
MM"
(I know now to skip over anything that's got his name on the cover, altho' if DH ever does want to turn their Gor properties into a comic, they definitely should contact him. I also notice that his board archives no longer go back that far...yay for auto-Orwellizing!)
This isn't a new concern, btw - Moore has simply articulated, very visibly, something that's been simmering in fandom for over a year now (again, the massive overlap between contempt for women and contempt for gay men in our society has meant that addressing one inevitably leads to the other) as laid out in this 2006 post
and commented on here, (also here and here) with the usual chorus of "No way is 3X 10X 20 ?X enemy action! Straight White Guys TOTALLY get hurt the EXACT same way too! You just want YOUR characters kept in cotton wadding instead of realizing that to have a great story you need to have TENSION!" from the usual suspects.
By contrast, the autonomous medium of webcomics allows for a lot more frank addressing of social issues, even more than the print indy comics world does - in principle, at least, since what it's actually used for much of the time is more (often-indifferently-drawn) T&A, and inwardly-spiraling self-referential humor. But still you sometimes get strips like Dominic Deegan, Oracle For Hire which started out as an in-joke-a-day strip but quickly turned into a plot-and-character-driven heroic fantasy of its own - one which routinely addresses sexism, racism, and homophobia in a traditional D&D setting, if a bit anviliciously at times. -I'm wondering when we'll see a sequence in mainstream comics - even the "edgy" "dark" ones that have featured jackhammer rape - with the namesake character's best friend being a bishie closeted antihero struggling graphically with the temptation to kill his unacknowledged love-interest's girlfriend so as to "claim" him, or the portrait of fannish dismay as idolized sports stars are revealed to be vile homophobic bigots and serial abusers of women...? And yet volume 1 is sold out and to be reprinted, without the benefit of a big corporate marketing department.
This is relevant because one of the frequent arguments for promoting homophobic narrative (or, conversely, having no queer characters at all) is that it's
"just good business", as if there were any respectable amount of stats to work from, where you could actually say that gee, Good-Guy Gays don't sell, it's obviously that and not the fact that we screwed up the release dates, or didn't promote it hardly at all, or that the overall plot stunk, or the continuity was ignored, or the art was really REALLY bad, or any of the myriad QC issues that plague mainstream sequential art. (Ditto for Strong Female Charas.) Obviously, you can't have it both ways (and expect to be taken seriously as an intellectual middleweight, even) - you can't say "There's nothing homophobic (or sexist, or racist) about plotline/characterization X!" and also say "Institutional homophobia/sexism/racism is Just Good Business!" without undercutting yourself.
Let's translate these questions, frex, out of weasel into plain English:
Was Shooter's story for "Rampaging Hulk" homophobic, especially in light of the supposed "no homosexuality" policy he was supposed to have in his books?
Or was the story a product of the time?
And if Shooter really had such a policy, was it because of homophobia or economic considerations?
becomes
Was Shooter's story homophobic or a product of the time because it was an expression of widespread societal homophobia?
and
Was Shooter's reported "No Gays Allowed" policy because of HIS homophobia, or economic considerations conscienceless pandering to homophobes?
To which I add, So what? like if it were the former, that would be any improvement? I hear this kind of tripe all the time from the fannish defenders of institutional sexism, too, and (albeit slightly softer) re institutional racism. But just swap out "homophobia" with "anti-Semitism" and see if Occasional's questions still sound like a good defense of Marvel...no, I didn't think so. If it came out that Fr. Coughlin hadn't really meant any of the things he said, but was just capitalizing on the spirit of the '30s, that would hardly exonerate him or his broadcasters.
And if exclusion and discrimination were good business, wouldn't you expect to see comics sales (and other problem-child mainstream media) overall going up, instead of down? Instead of increasing DIY responses, with an ever-increasing number of quality works amid all the Sturgeon?
It's funny that there are fannish complaints about having openly-GLBT characters, because superhero stories shouldn't be All About TEH SEX and that's what having queer charas does to a book - and no, I'm not going to point out the irony inherent in how no one ever asks this about having het charas marry or date or boff or get pregnant - when it is the editors and writers who insist these days on making their gay charas All About TEH SEX, in writing them as The Ones Who Get Violated (Like Women) and/or are permanently traumatized/motivated by this, or making the Francophone gorilla sidekick's quest to get a new body for his supervillainous master not just motivated by gratitude and affection - neither of which are ruled out by queerness - but by an overwhelming desire to be able to get it on with him at last. And arguments that there's no dramatic mileage to be had in having queer couples whose relationship isn't always full of angst and misery and threats of sexual violence against one or the other? Um, ISTR a number of teams and partnerships which have historically functional relationships - and where the stress isn't all about sexually-related threats (though this does happen to the female partners all too often...) but about the dangers of the superheroing job, which don't all revolve around rape somehow (at least when it comes to Straight Dudes--!)
No, lazy, unimaginative, and ignorant writing is not an excuse. It's an explanation - but it doesn't excuse anything.
And because I'm Evil Chaotic Good, I'll close by wondering how many of those fanboys whinging on Byrne's board about WHY should there have to be ANY gays in our comics, anyway? are not also Monty Python fans...pretty damn few, I'm betting. (Why? What's Holy Grail got to do with anything?)
ETA: Here's a detailed take on the Freedom Ring situation by a fan whose experience of RL violence gives a more relevant perspective than most fans will ever have re gaybashing (frex see also this actor's indignation at "ungrateful" and "oversensitive" responses to his attempts to profit off "humorous" references to it) and the usual denials of significance by the privileged, which I juxtapose with Joe Q's handwaving re bias and his revelation that the writer of the Freedom Ring series always planned for the character to be feeble and ineffective and a victim...which he seems to have known even when he was touting FR as "proof" that Marvel wasn't homophobic. Smarmy.
Further: OMG. No excuses. NO DAMN EXCUSES for them. What's missing from a tragic story about a gay superhero who just can't cut it? Did you say a reminder that the most bland, conventional same-sex relationship is inherently "kinky" in the minds of the mainstream jackasses? Or did you say, a graveside joke about pegboys at his funeral? Hey, go for broke, they're BOTH the right answer! Of course only people looking to be offended would find anything wrong with any of this. --Not to mention turning Peter Parker from wiseacre to sociopath - Spidey makes bad jokes at the expense of his opponents, and at his own expense, in typical underdog/sad-clown style, he's not a soulless fratboy. Somebody take these children's crayons away before they hurt themselves...
Reminder: If you have, or spot, any posts or pages you'd like to suggest for this month's Carnival for SF Fans/Creators of Color, you can use this automatic form to submit them with.